Proginės Vaižganto kalbos

Abstract

This article reviews some occasional speeches, mostly written (or delivered) by Vaižgantas in 1930 at the time he lived in Kaunas. The speeches were published in the "Lietuvos aidas" semiofficial newspaper. The article points up prevailing tendencies and generalities of the speeches and groups them into two comparative types: holiday speeches to commemorate an honorable person or to open a town or state important object, and epitaphic (sermon) speeches. Majority of Vaižgantas’ occasional speeches are related to Vytautas Magnus 500th birthday anniversary. Their distinguishing features are: the width of mind, absorption into the personality and his jobs, the emphasis on the person’s devotion to his nation and the state. To reveal his mind Vaižgantas uses a rich means of expressive and rhetorical style – starting with a vivid word, a metaphor, phraseological unit, and ending with a rhythmical sentence and the speech rhythmical text in total. A characteristic feature of his speech style is determined by lively native vocabulary, an intonation based material and metaphoric simultaneously intellectual speech. The style is also determined by prominent views and pictorial components, a sentence expression and rhetoric.